May 6th marks the 3-year anniversary of the release of the HBO TV miniseries Chernobyl. Winning a total of 84 awards, ten of which were Emmy awards, the historical drama celebrated universal critical acclaim. It was a short, 5-episode series, precise and compact in scope, which unfolded the saga of the nuclear disaster of the Chernobyl power plant that happened on April 26, 1986.
But why revisit and remember the Chernobyl series now? Well, all one needs to do is type the word “Russia” into a search engine to see why. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which started on February 24th, still persists, and the skirmishes are being fought less on the ground and more in the minds of the Russian people and the world abroad.
Russia’s continued push for control over the narrative regarding the conflict continues to evolve. In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law that criminalized any reporting that contradicted the Russian government’s official statements. Russia fabricated narratives that blamed the West and Ukraine for initiating and stoking the conflict.
Russia does not limit its disinformation campaign to its domestic audience, though. While many European and U.S. news and social media outlets are trying to prevent the spread of misinformation, Russia is looking further afield to Latin American audiences, reaching through news and social media as well. Russia even used social media such as TikTok to subvert searches for Ukraine through the app, leading users to pro-Russia videos.
The series Chernobyl and the battles between Russia and Ukraine share one principal concern: misinformation. Chernobyl contextualizes the rampant misinformation in the light of the Cold War within the USSR and to the rest of the world.
The opening line of the series speaks well enough for the relevancy of this show today: “What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”
Throughout the show, the truth about the Chernobyl disaster is suppressed. The true horror of the disaster is supplanted by a feel-good message from the government, which tries to hide the disaster in every way possible at the expense of its citizens’ lives. Clearly, there has not been much change in the government, and the whole world runs the risk of no longer recognizing the truth of the Ukraine crisis if they don’t remain vigilant.
The generation experiencing the Ukraine-Russia crisis can learn from the disaster and coverup of Chernobyl, and the HBO miniseries Chernobyl is the best representation of Russian disinformation tactics and the cost of these lies.
While the historical drama of Chernobyl ends on a rather hopeless note, I have some hope the generation today that searches for the truth will find it amid the noise of misinformation—as Legasov, the protagonist, says in the series, “. . . It is always there, whether we can see it or not . . .”